Storage

Revision as of 00:21, 29 January 2012 by Sam.nicholson (talk | contribs) (Wrote the article for shared storage)
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There is a plethora of drives available to you when editing in YSTV, this guide should give you some idea of how to use them and where various files should live.

Tempvideo (D:)

This is a 1TB hard drive sitting in each Edit PC, which will always appear as the D:\ drive. Inside this drive you will find a folder called Shows, which is where you store files and projects you're working on at the moment. You should also capture into this drive and export finished shows here as well before copying them to the Finished Shows (S:\) network drive.

Always edit from this drive, and copy back to Pending Edits (P:\) before you leave. You should never leave anything on this drive that does not exist on Pending Edits (P:\) as it could fail without warning.

Please try to clean out your old projects from this drive when they are done, scrapped or stalled for more than a week, to leave space for others.

The other Edit PC's Tempvideo (L:)

This is always the tempvideo drive in the Edit PC you're not currently sitting at, and is located at L:\ (unless the other machine is switched off or missing). If you've left something on the other Edit PC which you want to work on, you MUST copy it across to the D:\ drive of your machine before working on it or editing will be slow and unreliable.

Never edit from this drive, and the same warning regarding leaving files apply as to D:\

Pending Edits (P:)

This is part of the 1.8TB RAID 5 array on our fileserver, and mounts as P:\. This drive should contain all in-progress productions, including images, music, captured video and the project files. When you wish to start editing you should copy relevant files to your D:\ drive, and when you are done copy them back. Also, after capturing the captured files should be copied here and spot-checked BEFORE you relinquish the tapes. Note that if you copied a project and all of the captured footage from this drive, you only need to copy back the project file, as the footage will not have changed.

This drive is backed up nightly to the backup server, and is in a redundant RAID 5 array, so it would take a total of 4 simultaneous hard drive failures to lose data, which is fairly unlikely.

Finished Shows (S:\)

This is another part of the RAID array on the file server, and mounts as S:\. This drive should contain only completed productions, and is where the website pulls video files from for encoding and adding as live videos. You should not export to this drive (as your export will fail if the network glitches or becomes busy) but should export to Tempvideo and copy to here afterwards. Once your show is up on the website, you should delete your files in Pending Edits and Tempvideo, as this drive preserves a high-quality copy of finished shows for NaSTA for example.

Note that this drive will likely get wiped shortly after NaSTA and the HD playout videos will become the high-quality archive. This drive is backed up in the same way as Pending Edits.

Show Resources (R:\)

Ongoing shows often generate files such as title sequences, running orders, music and graphics, which should be preserved here. Also this is where VTs should be uploaded to. Never edit from this drive.

In here is also a stock footage folder, where anything which you feel may come in handy later should go (be selective here, not everything you captured)

This drive is backed up in the same way as Pending Edits.

Documents (O:\)

This drive should contain documents that are considered important but not overly sensitive, such as the society's budget, PDFs of manuals for pieces of equipment or running orders for shows.

Note that your home directory should be used for storage of anything you are working on at the moment, or which is of a sensitive nature, as it can only be accessed by you.

Software (M:\)

This drive has some ISOs and some of YSTV's custom software. Mostly of use to the Computing team.

Playout (Y:\)

This drive contains all the playout videos, which are the highest quality copy of anything no longer in finished shows. Do not save anything to this folder, only the encode server should add files here

You Home Directory (H:\)

This is also the Documents and Downloads folders on Windows. It contains your mailbox and all of your personal files, along with the www folder whose contents will appear over the internet at http://ystv.co.uk/~your.username to enable downloading of large files. You can use this to store anything you please, however note that the Downloads folder will be erased when you log out.

Editing Workflow

  • Capture: You should capture to the D:\ drive, then copy to P:\
  • Starting Editing: If it is not already on the D:\ drive, copy your project from P:\, then edit as normal
  • Finishing Editing: When you finish editing copy the files you have changed to P:\ to make sure they are caught by the backup. If you don't do this you may lose work.
  • Finishing a show and exporting: Export your show to D:\ then copy to S:\
  • Having uploaded and checked your show: Erase the files you were using from D:\, L:\ and P:\